8 2GM Tuesday May 24 2022 | the times
News
Railway unions have revealed plans to
cripple the London Underground when
millions of people return to work after
the Queen’s jubilee weekend.
The RMT is calling on 4,000 staff to
walk out of every Tube station on
Monday June 6 in a significant escala-
tion of its row with Transport for
London (TfL) over pensions, pay rises
and feared job losses.
The union had already ordered a se-
ries of strikes during the long weekend.
Walkouts will close Green Park and
Euston stations on Friday, June 3, and
there will be no services on the Central,
Jubilee and Victoria lines after 9pm
that day or the following day.
More than eight out of ten people who
worked from home during the
pandemic plan to carry on doing so
alongside travelling to the office.
Figures from the Office for National
Statistics (ONS) showed that 84 per
cent of employees wanted to keep up
the “hybrid” system of home and office
working.
Only 8 per cent said that they would
return to working at the office full-time.
The hybrid working pattern appears
to have shifted more in favour of people
spending most of their working hours
Only 8% who worked at home plan full-time return to office
at home. By February this year, the
most common hybrid pattern among
workers — at 42 per cent — was
operating mostly from home and
sometimes from the office. This was
an increase from 30 per cent in April
last year.
The proportion who planned to split
their time equally between work and
home, or stay mostly at their place of
work and occasionally from home, fell.
The proportion who planned to
return to their place of work perma-
nently also fell from 11 per cent in April
last year to 8 per cent in February of this
year. The most common benefit ofworking from home was improved
work-life balance, according to 78 per
cent of those who worked from home in
some capacity.
Almost half also reported improved
wellbeing because of staying at home.
Higher earners — those earning
£40,000 or more — were more likely to
hybrid work and to work from home
exclusively, the ONS research found.
Those earning £15,000 or less were the
least likely to report hybrid working.
The figures appeared to show that
workers were ignoring pleas from min-
isters to return to offices and other sites,
as the threat of the pandemic eases.The ONS noted that the most
common reason given for retaining
working from home was that it had be-
come part of workers’ “normal routine”.
Andy Haldane, 54, the former chief
economist for the Bank of England,
now a government adviser, praised
hybrid working but insisted that
creativity was sparked at the office.
Haldane, also president of Pro Bono
Economics, an organisation which
helps the charitable sector, told The
Times: “There’s a balance to be struck.
Hybrid working — all the evidence I’ve
seen is that there’s a happy medium
between some of the benefits ofworking from home and some of the
benefits of being in.
“One of the wellsprings of creativity
is the serendipitous informal interac-
tions. Non-staged, non-Zoomed
conversations. Many of my ideas have
come from those informal moments, so
I do think there’s something about
creativity in the workplace being
nurtured by those chance interactions,
those informal conversations.
“The hybrid model has great virtues
and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests
that balance between the two is some-
thing that recognises the benefits of
both ways of operating.”James Beal Social Affairs Editor
Rail militants
‘are apologists
for Kremlin’
Charlie Parker, James Beal
The union behind the Tube strikes that
threaten to derail thousands of jubilee
celebration plans is led by “militant”
socialists and alleged Putin apologists
with links to the Labour Party.
Mick Lynch, 60, became general sec-
retary of the RMT in May last year and
said “all I want from life is a bit of social-
ism” in an interview days later. He told
The Guardian that unions must “make a
militant stand and use the strike weap-
on”.
Lynch lives in a west London home
worth about £730,000 and has earned
more than £763,000 in salary and bene-
fits since joining the union in 2015. He
was assistant general secretary of the
RMT on more than £100,000 a year in
pay and benefits before he became
leader and moved to a package worth
£124,000. The union says that he took a
voluntary pay cut to £84,174 at its 2021
annual meeting.
A father of three adult children and
married to an NHS nurse, Lynch grew
up on a Paddington council estate and
left school at 16. He worked as an elec-
trician before taking a building job but
was later blacklisted because of his
union activity.
Eddie Dempsey is the RMT’s senior
assistant general secretary with a
salary package worth £108,549. He has
been criticised as a Putin apologist due
to his ties to Aleksey Mozgovoy, a mili-
tant separatist commander in Luhansk,
who was assassinated in 2015. Dempsey
was criticised in March after Russia’s in-
vasion of Ukraine when a picture of
him with the pro-Putin leader emerged
online. It was taken in Donbas in 2015.
After Mozgovoy’s death, Dempsey
wrote a tribute praising the “charismat-
ic” Kremlin-backed insurgent and
described the West’s diplomacy in the
region as a “US-orchestrated coup”. He
signed a Stop the War coalition state-
ment last week that criticised Nato’s
“disdain for Russian concerns”.
The president of the RMT is Alex
Gordon, 55, a former train driver and
Marxist who has been criticised for
regurgitating Russian propaganda
falsely accusing Ukraine of being “a
failed state held to ransom by neo-
Nazis”. In 2015, a year after the invasion
of Crimea, he protested at Ukraine’s
embassy in London. Gordon sits on theexecutive and political committees of
the Communist Party of Britain.
Labour MPs have backed RMT cam-
paigns. Angela Rayner, the deputy
party leader, faced a backlash in 2018
after she backed an RMT rail strike that
led to passengers passing out on an
overcrowded London-bound train. She
spoke of her “solidarity” for union
members taking part in the walkout.
In March this year, she and other
Labour MPs appeared with Lynch
during a protest against P&O job cuts.The RMT represents many of the 800
fired staff. However, Sadiq Khan, the
mayor of London, appears to oppose
the planned rail strikes. He said this
week that action on the jubilee week-
end “sent the wrong message”.
Labour said: “It’s vital that govern-
ment strike a long-term funding deal
with TfL [Transport for London] to
avoid people’s jubilee weekend celebra-
tions being disrupted. Sadiq Khan has
been clear he shares the frustration of
Londoners. The right way forward is forthe union to work with City Hall to
demand a long-term, sustainable deal
from government ministers that pro-
tects London’s public transport system.”
The RMT said that the union op-
posed “the war in Ukraine and has
called for the immediate withdrawal of
Russian troops.” Dempsey has “sup-
ported that position”, it added.
“The salaries of all RMT officials are
wholly transparent and are decided
through the union’s democratic struc-
tures,” the statement added.Mick Lynch, RMT
general secretary,
speaks in central
London to back
striking lecturersNews Politics
Strike to hit Tube after jubilee holiday
Charlie Parker The latest announcement will add
widespread chaos as the capital returns
to work after the celebrations, with the
RMT hoping that a lack of staff at
stations will force the closure of the en-
tire system for safety reasons.
Only a small number of stations in
outer London will be able to open with-
out staff and some replacement bus ser-
vices may run. The industrial action
will coincide with a ban on overtime,
which will last from June 2 until July 10.
Revenue protection officers belong-
ing to the RMT will be involved in the
June 6 walkout but Tube drivers will
not. The 24-hour strike will begin a
minute after midnight and is likely to
force the closure of almost all stations
in the central zone 1. The last time the
RMT crippled the London Under-
ground was in March, when two days of
network-wide protests led to more than
200 stations being shut. They were the
worst Tube strikes in five years and cost
TfL £13 million in income from fares.
The strikes are over the union’s fears
for staff pensions and the potential loss
of jobs from plans to get rid of 600 posts
at stations.
A review of TfL’s pension scheme,
published in March, found that reform-
ing it could save up to £182.4 million a
year, although it would take years for
the savings to be realised. However, no
formal proposals to change benefits
have been published.
TfL insists that no one will lose their
job because of the reduction in stationposts but Mick Lynch, general secre-
tary of the RMT, said: “TfL is trying to
bulldoze through 600 job losses on
London Underground and our mem-
bers are not prepared to accept that.
“Station staff play a crucial role in
serving the travelling public and were
heroes during the 7/7 terrorist attacks.”
Tube drivers can earn £70,000 to
£80,000 when overtime and benefits
are taken into account. Since the row
began about 15,000 Tube staff have
been given an 8.4 per cent pay rise.
However, Lynch has demanded
increases of at least 10 per cent.
TfL said: “We’ve been in regular talks
with the RMT and are hoping to find an
urgent resolution.”
At least four in five mainline rail ser-vices could be cancelled if RMT mem-
bers vote for separate summer strike
action on the national network, leading
to fears of possible blackouts due to dis-
ruption of freight trains supplying
power plants. The ballot closes today.
Ministers have been warned of the
potential for power cuts in some areas if
action lasts more than a couple of days,
according to reports.
There are concerns that there will
only be enough signal workers to allow
20 per cent of trains to run with bosses
devising emergency plans to prioritise
trains supplying power plants on some
routes, the Daily Mail reported.
Petrol and diesel suppliers including
Tesco have also raised concerns over
the impact on supply lines.
TOMMY LONDON/ALAMY